The Origins of Totalitarianism - Hannah Arendt

Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism is a political system in which the state holds complete authority over the society. They try to control all aspects of people’s public and private lives as much as they can.

Totalitarianism was first developed in the 1920s positively by the Italian fascists. It became prominent in Western anti-communist political discourse during the Cold War era to highlight similarities between Nazi Germany and other fascist regimes on one hand and Soviet communism on the other.

The political and societal goals and practises of militant Islam have also been labelled as totalitarianism.

The idea of totalitarianism a ‘total’ political power by state was formulated in 1923 by Giovanni Amendola who described Italian Fascismas a system different from conventional dictatorships. The term was later assigned a positive meaning in the writings of Giovanni Gentile, Italy’s most popular philosopher and leading theorist of fascism. He used the term “totalitario” to refer to the structure and goals of the new state. The new state was to provide the ‘total representation of the nation and total guidance of national goals.’ He described totalitarianism as a society in which the ideology of the state had influence, if not power, over most of its citizens.

Whoever rose to power developed entirely new political institutions and destroyed all social, legal and political traditions of the country. Totalitarian government created a mass movement in shift of power and shifted the centre of power from the army to the police. Present totalitarian government have developed from a one party system to operating to a system of morals where it was difficult to predict their course of action.

If we consider that despite many variations the government did not change in the two and a half thousand years that separate Plato and Kant we interpret totalitarianism as a form of modern tyranny that is a lawless government where power is controlled by one man. Traits throughout the tyranny tradition is fear as the principle of action of the people by their ruler and similarly fear of the ruler by the people.

There was a sense of natural law which created the standard of what is right and wrong. The law of history and nature is applied to mankind. Totalitarianism policy claims to transform the human specie into an active carrier of the law. The difference between the totalitarianism and other concepts of law is that the totalitarianism policy does not replace one set of laws with another, does not establish its own consensus or create a new form of legality.

Positive laws were changeable according to circumstances but were designed to function as stabilising factors for the ever changing movements of men. When the Nazis talk about the law of nature and the Bolsheviks talk about the law of history, they both no longer stabilise the source of authority for the actions of mortal men. Darwin’s idea of man as the product of a natural development that doesn’t stop with the present species of human being just as Bolshevik’s belief in a class struggle as the expression of the law of history lies Marx notion of society as the product of a historical movement which works on its own law of motion to the end of historical times when it will abolish itself.

The difference between Marx historical and Darwin’s naturalistic approach has frequently been pointed out in favour of Marx. It turns out that not the actual achievement but the basic philosophies of both men are the movement of history and are the same as natural life appears to also be historical. The ‘natural law’ of the survival of the fittest is just as much a historical law as Marx’s law of the survival of the most progressive class.

If it is the law of nature to eliminate everything that is harmful and unfit to live it would mean the end of nature itself if the new categories of the harmful and unfit to live could not be found. Terror becomes total when it becomes independent of all opposition and rules when nobody stands in its way. If lawfulness is the essence of non-tyrannical government and lawlessness is the essence of tyranny, then terror is the essence of totalitarianism domination.

From the totalitarianism point of view the fact that men are born and die is just an annoying interference with higher forces. Terror executes on the spot the death sentences that Nature is supposed to have pronounced on races or individuals who are ‘unfit to live’ or History on ‘dying classes’, without waiting for the slower and less efficient processes of nature or history themselves.

Laws in free societies only state what people should not do without telling people what they should do and how they should behave. The definition of what governments needed was what Montesquieu called a ‘principle of action’ which was different between each form of government and would inspire government and citizens in their public activity. Terror in the totalitarian government is not sufficient to inspire and guide human behaviour.

Total terror selects its victims according to objective standards and its executioners with as complete a disregard as possible for the candidates conviction and sympathies.

The aim of totalitarianism education was to destroy the capacity to form convictions. Himmler’s organisational invention was where he selected candidates from photographs according to racial criteria. It was nature that decided who was eliminated but who was to be trained as an executioner. No guiding principle of behaviour was given it was taken itself from the realm of human action such as virtue, Honor, fear. It introduced an entirely new principle into public affairs that dispenses with human will to action and appeals to the craving need for insight into the law of movement according to which the terror functions and private destinies depend.

The process may decide that those that eliminate races and individuals today or the members of dying classes are those who must be sacrificed. Totalitarianism needs an ideology that gives an equal role of the executioner and the role of the victim. Before Hitler and Stalin the great political potentialities of the ideologies were discovered.

Ideologies are known for their scientific character combining the scientific approach with results of philosophical relevance and pretend to be scientific philosophy. An ideology is what its name indicates: it is the logic of an idea. Its subject is history to which the ‘idea’ is applied unfolding a process of constant change.

The idea of ideology is neither Plato’s eternal essence grasped by the eyes of the mind nor Kant’s principle of reason but has become an explanation.

All ideologies contain totalitarian elements but these are fully developed only by totalitarianism movements creating the impression that only racism and communism are totalitarian in character.

Ideologies tend to explain not what is but what becomes, what is born and passes away. They are concerned with the element of motion and history in the sense of the world. They are always aimed towards history but proceed from the basis of nature explaining historical matters and reducing them to matters of nature. It tries to explain the past, the total knowledge of the present and the reliable prediction of the future.

Secondly it is independent of all experience from which it cannot learn anything new. The sixth sense is provided by the ideology taught by the educational institutions to train the ‘political soldiers’.

Thirdly since the ideologies have no power to transform reality they achieve this through experience. Once the premise is established its point of departure can not be taught by reality.

Isolation may be the beginning of terror and usually happens to rule over men who are isolated together. Terror leaves no time for private life and destroys men’s capacities for experience. Isolation in the political sphere is called loneliness inn the sphere of social intercourse. These factors are not the same as I can be isolated in a situation I cannot act upon because nobody is with me without being lonely. Similarly I can be lonely in a situation where I feel deserted by human company.

Isolation concerns political life and tends to affect man in his work whereas loneliness concerns human life as a whole.

Hegel said that ‘nobody has understood me except one; and he is also misunderstood’ from his deathbed.

The crisis of our time and its central experience have lead to an entirely new form of government  where there is potential for an ever present danger to stay with us from now on. There is also the truth that every end in history contains a beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only ‘message’.